Special Pride Playlist, New Dope Tracks, and Doja Cat...Sailor Moon stan or alt-right racist?
6/26/20
Happy Pride everyone! NYC Pride is this weekend and I can’t believe that it will be virtual this year. In honor of Pride, I’ve assembled a special playlist filled with LBTQ female rappers (sorry, gay men) for you to discover and get down to, link below!
There’s also the usual updated weekly playlist below, as well some track highlights and a look into Doja Cat’s new music video and whether she’s an alt-right racist.
Playlist Highlights: Stressful, Sexual or Soulful
Hailing from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Kierra Luv is only 18 years old but is already co-signed by Cardi B, who discovered Luv’s trending rendition to “Money” on her Instagram page. The young rapper has mostly been known for her freestyles and covers of chart topping songs by other artists, but this past week Luv dropped her debut mixtape, Take It Or Leave It, which she hopes will inspire others through these current hard times. While there are several standout tracks on the album, a highlight for me is “WWD”, which Luv says is based on a stressful vent session between herself and someone else close to her. Even though Luv’s flow here is laced with ferocity and her lyrics are charged with less than chipper feelings about a flaky individual, the song manages to feel bouncy with its xylophone riffs and booming bass and is not too dissimilar to some of Cardi B’s 2018 mega-hits “Be Careful” and “I Like It”. Luv is certainly one to watch out for down the road, definitely more a Take It, than Leave It kinda gal.
This past week, Dallas, Texas based rapper Erica Banks released her self-titled debut project under the management of 1501 Certified Entertainment, the same label that Megan Thee Stallion has been beefing with the past few months. Naturally, as another Texan female rapper from the same record label, Banks’ name has been immediately thrown around by listeners, deeming her as merely a copycat of Stallion, with an almost identical cadence and flow. And for some reason that’s a problem? I think I can name 100 male rappers who sound exactly the same to me but I don’t see too many complaints about that. Thankfully, Banks brushed off the accusations and criticisms with ease, pointing out that Texas rappers all sound very similar regardless of location. She tweeted: “Only ppl from Texas understand we all have the same “accent” lol,”. Besides, is it so bad to be compared to Megan, who’s had one of the most successful rap careers of 2019 and 2020, male or female? Banks’ album has a lot of great Stallion-esque tracks, but the highlight for sure is the punchy track “Trip Out”, whose first sequence of beats will pull you in immediately, and then seconds later the effluence of Banks’ sexually explicit lyrics and buttery flow will keep you hooked.
Memphis-born and Atlanta-based rapper Stahhr’s music takes me right back to the Golden-Era of hip hop, and her voice makes me immediately want to compare her to the likes of conscious female rap great, Bahamdia. Formerly the only female member of the Sub Verse Music and Metalface Records rosters, Stahhr has been in the rap game for decades but only released her first solo album in 2008. More recently, she dropped her latest EP, No Doubts, on which she soulfully raps intellectual and socially conscious lyrics over beats that pull from classic funk and jazz influences. The opening track on it, also entitled “No Doubts”, immediately made my ears perk up with its good old fashioned record scratching intro and the absolutely amazing bar “I am in the presence of a King like Coretta”. I wish more poetic and intellectual rap like this could make it big, but sadly that rarely happens these days, especially coming from the voice of a female. And as much as I do love the hyper-sexualized, catchy pop-rap that is pushed to the forefront in the industry, I often feel that simple but soulful, lyrically astute rap is exactly the type of music we should all really be listening to and supporting, and Stahhr should definitely be on that playlist.
New Video Alert - Doja Cat…Should We “Like That”?
Coming off a sensational run (and still going strong) with her single “Say So”, which has been streamed billions of times, certified platinum, and peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Doja Cat dropped a music video yesterday for her next trending single, “Like That”. Her previous video for “Say So” was a sepia-seventies disco dreamland and was recently nominated for a BET Hip Hop Award, and her new video does not disappoint either. “Like That” finds Doja in another dreamy-hued sequence, though this time she’s grooving in a mood-lit, live-action hallway surrounded by floating animations of hearts, stars, and orbiting planets.
The new video drops at an interesting time for Doja Cat, who has recently found herself in hot water with fans when several weeks ago content surfaced of her participating in what were deemed as alt-right chat rooms, and in addition, when an old song of hers from 2015 called “Dindu Nuffin” resurfaced which fans deemed to be is in some way mocking the death of Sandra Bland (The term "Dindu Nuffin" has often been used to taunt Blacks who were victims of police brutality). After these accusations, the hashtag #DojaCatIsOverParty began to trend on twitter, and for the past few weeks Doja has since been apologizing to fans, and explaining that all the controversies are just misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In a video confession, Cat explains that the song was in no way connected to police brutality or Sandra Bland, and ruefully states: "to see a song, my song that I made, connected to an innocent black woman's death is one of the most awful rumors that I've ever encountered."
Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it will be interesting to see whether this controversy affects the success of “Like That”, though I highly doubt it will (after 1 day the video already has over 2M streams). The video itself though is visually pleasing and playful, with snippets of Doja— who is decked out in a butt-length durag and assless-cargo short-chaps (I need those!)—and her dancers doing choreography in an ambient and ombre hued hallway. Around the dancing women are interactive animations that float and bounce across the screen, and in between cuts of these real life choreographed scenes are clips with an amazing animation sequence of Doja Cat full-on channeling Sailor Moon, complete with a Spiral Heart Moon Rod. If you told me that one day Sailor Moon and twerking would be working in conjunction with one another, I would have laughed in disbelief. But hey, it’s 2020, and at this point anything goes. Check out the video above!